Potentialy dumb question here, is there any benefit to using btrfs on a non system disk? I'm fairly ignorant on file systems, asfaik btrfs largest benefit is snapshotting, not sure of anyothers.

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[–] -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I usually just stick to the standard file system to any OS.

So for Linux that would be ext4.

For external drives i use either FAT32 (the ol' reliable) or exFAT (the fastest for dealing with large files when you set the max allocation unit size AKA 32MB).

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    So for Linux that would be ext4.

    It's worth noting that the default file system varies by distro - there is no 'Linux' default. For example, RHEL et al use XFS as the default.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I thought RHEL is going with ext4 or btrfs these days. I know Fedora is on btrfs, while Debian & Ubuntu is on ext4.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    RHEL is going hard on XFS, they've even completely removed BTRFS support from their kernel - they don't have any in-house development competency in it after all. It's somewhat understandable in that regard, since otherwise they wouldn't necessarily be able to offer filesystem-level support to their paying customers.

    Though it is a little bit amusing, seeing as Fedora - the RHEL upstream - uses BTRFS as their default filesystem.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    make menuconfig says:

    Ext2 is a standard Linux file system for hard disks.

    And this for ext4:

    This is the next generation of the ext3 filesystem.

    But defaly indeed is ext4.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    ext4 is literally just the latest version of the ext filesystem (AKA it has the most funcionality).

    If you REALLY wanted MAX speed, you could make your system drive ext2, but you would lose some metadata, drive info & management tools.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, both SUSE and Fedora use BTRFS as the default file system, RHEL uses XFS, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    openSUSE uses BTRFS as the default filesystem for / and if you have any additional disks (for example a separate home) it uses XFS by default. Unless that's changed since the last time I installed.

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